The book contains detailed drawings of men, women, and children wearing examples of clothing from every period. Some of the most eye-catching trends in costume history are featured, including knights' armor from the thirteenth century, the exaggeratedly pointed shoes worn in the fifteenth century, and the curled and powdered wigs of the eighteenth century. Each costume, whether worn by an Egyptian queen, a medieval court jester, or a schoolmistress in the Old West, is meticulously drawn and concisely described. Every historical period is covered, from the Ancient World to modern times,...

This lavishly illustrated book is the first full-length study of Inigo Jones as a stage designer. Jones' designs for the Stuart court masques played a crucial role in transmitting the visual language of the Italian Renaissance tradition into English culture, and John Peacock examines the ways in which he adapted them from continental sources, many of them identified here for the first time. His exploration adds a new dimension to our knowledge and understanding of a figure who is generally considered the most important English artist of the seventeenth century.

Based on a close study of Van Dyck's Self-portrait with a Sunflower, this book examines the picture's context in the symbolic discourses of the period and in the artist's oeuvre. The portrait is interpreted as a programmatic statement, made in the ambience of the Caroline court after Van Dyck's appointment as 'Principal Painter', of his view of the art of painting. This statement, formulated in appropriately visual terms, characterizes painting as a way of looking and seeing, a mode of vision. In making such a claim, the artist steps aside from the familiar debate about whether painting was a...